


The Deeper Magic

by kittydesade



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Gen, LGBTQ Character, Misses Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-10
Updated: 2011-12-10
Packaged: 2017-10-27 06:13:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claudia can't let go, but in time she finds that maybe she can let it be, and maybe that's all she needed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Deeper Magic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Phantom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phantom/gifts).



> Spoilers for episodes 3x11 (Emily Lake) and 3x12 (Stand) of Warehouse 13.

Claudia shut her eyes, dug her palms against her eyelids and pressed until the tears stopped. No one noticed. Not because they didn't care, she knew they cared, but because everyone had their own problems to deal with.

The Warehouse was gone. They'd tried two or three different means of resurrecting it and Mrs. Frederic, none of them worked. Artie had them all running contingency plans on what to do with the artifacts that were still out there and still needed to be bagged, regardless of whether or not they had anywhere to put them. Everyone worked till they were exhausted and couldn't think, went back up to Leena's and passed out more than slept, then came back and did it all again. In a way she was glad Artie was being such a slave driver; it kept her from thinking. From dreaming, most of the time.

Not all the time. Sometimes, and it coincided with the days she snuck down to see him, she did have those dreams. His head lolled back at a way too uncomfortable angle, his lips blue and his skin pasty. Those were the nights she woke up at dark o'clock in the morning and dived for the toilet to throw up whatever she'd managed to scarf down in between emergencies. Then she rinsed her mouth, wiped down, flushed the toilet and went back to bed. No crying. There's no crying in Warehouse agenting, Claudia. She had to keep telling herself that. No crying, and no punching Pete every time he told her that Jinks knew the risks. If she heard that one more time she was going to scream.

Myka knew better than to say stupid things. Which didn't mean she didn't give Claudia funny looks out of the corner of her eye. Like she thought Claudia was going to do something stupid, which, duh. Of course not. She'd exhausted all her stupid when she'd gotten into a knock-down drag out fight over the pendulum. That she'd lost. She only admitted it was stupid because she'd lost.

But that meant she'd lost Steve too, and that sent her into a fit so severe she wouldn't come out of her room except to eat, drink, and scream at people for two days.

They agreed, at least, to put him in the box. One of the artifacts from Warehouse 7, Jane brought it out as a sympathy ploy, Claudia figured, in exchange for getting him killed in the first place. It was the original Snow White coffin, and two weeks into Steve's tenure in it she went in and tried kissing him to see if it would wake him up. Nothing happened.

She'd gotten most of the way through his personnel file to see if there was some old boyfriend she could convince to come out to Bumsville South Dakota and try and kiss him awake when Leena caught her at it. "Does Artie know you're in the FBI personnel records?"

"Please. Does Artie pay attention to anything these days that doesn't involve rebuilding the Warehouse? Or artifacts. Or yelling at people."

Leena gave Claudia the same kind of look she imagined mothers gave teenaged daughters.

"What?"

"He pays attention. Everybody's paying attention, just because you stopped throwing things doesn't mean they stopped ducking." She came around the table, pulled up a chair at an angle from Claudia. "Do you really think combing through his personnel file is going to help?"

Claudia opened her mouth in an exaggerated O of indignation, then pressed her lips together and didn't answer. Even if Leena could pick up on her Snow White plan, she didn't want to go into how she'd tried and it hadn't worked. "Can't hurt. Besides, they should ..." And then she remembered the notifications. Myka and Pete had done it, but Steve's parents had talked to her for a little bit after. She'd given them a few stories about Jinks. Not the classified stuff, but stories about when they'd been waiting in airports, driving to assignments. What a friend Steve had been.

"They should...?" Leena asked.

Claudia shook her head. "Never mind. Thinking out loud. It's nothing."

But now she had no good excuse for why she was going through Steve's personnel file and so she closed it and slammed the screen down harder than it needed. Not hard enough to crack it. She thought. "What are you doing here?"

Leena sighed; if she knew anything about what Claudia had been up to even from a surface scan, she also knew better than to talk about it. "I wanted to tell you that the Regents are here. They want to talk to you about Mrs. Frederic. The caretaker position."

God, Claudia had forgotten all about that, at least for the last couple of days. It kept coming up lately. The Regents wanted to get started on a new warehouse, and they were looking at her for the caretaker on Mrs. Frederic's recommendation. But a lot of things had changed between the woman's evaluation and Claudia now, without Steve, and she didn't know if she could hack it. She didn't know if she wanted to try.

"Right, yeah." Claudia shook her head, pushed her streak out of the way. It was blue, today. Pale blue. Ice blue. "Yeah, I'll be right down."

  


* * *

  
No one chased after her when she pounded feet out the door of the office, shouting. Not screaming but real shouting, semi-coherent swearing and casting aspersions on the character of every Regent who had ever lived and all kinds of things, to hell with the Warehouse. To hell with all of it.

Only she liked the Warehouse. Not the organization, just the Warehouse itself. She would have hidden in the Warehouse if it was still there, she loved that place. Funny how things worked out. Sykes had taken everything she loved away from her. He probably hadn't even known she existed.

Claudia hid in the old warehouse that wasn't the Warehouse but still worked as a temporary holding area, folded her arms on Steve's glass box and leaned her forehead on her wrists and cried. Six weeks into the post-splosion life as an agent and she was already falling apart, how the hell was she supposed to be caretaker of a whole new Warehouse?

"This is insane," she told him. Told the glass, he couldn't hear her, he was beyond hearing. "This is totally insane. I can't do this."

The glass coffin didn't say anything. Its occupant didn't say anything. Good listeners, not so much with the sage advice.

"Come on, Steve." She sniffled, then choked back a snot-bubble laugh. "I mean, come on, you're Steve. Jinks, not Rogers, but still, you gotta wake up and be all, what happened, I was only out for a minute. Okay, so that was after he was frozen in the Arctic for like, fifty years, but..."

Lame joke. She could picture the look Steve would give her for that joke. That whole Really Claude? look.

"Sorry, never mind."

Six weeks and the memories were already fading, and she didn't want them to. After the first couple of days she wrote everything down that she could remember about Steve, first their last conversation in the woods, then just going with the flow and writing down everything she could remember, as fast as she could. With little breaks in between to go sob and heave over the sink and drink water and come back to the keyboard. Pete found her several hours later passed out and drooling with one hand on the USB mouse. Those were some of the worst dreams of her life.

She leaned her cheek on the glass, on her hand, dragged her other hand up and down over where his arm would be. "Come on, Steve, please? You know I'm a total spaz, you know I can't do this without you, man. Something'll happen in the new Warehouse or Pete'll do something stupid and my head'll spin around and explode. Good thing I don't like pea soup."

Nothing. He didn't move. If she looked really close she could see he wasn't breathing, so she didn't look that close. It freaked her out a little, okay, more than a little. Him lying there, perfectly preserved. No one knew what happened when you put someone in there, all they had to go on were rumors and people who had died while in the box.

"What's he going to do, die a second time?" Pete had argued for it, when he thought Claudia wasn't around to hear. "It's worth a shot, isn't it?"

"It's an artifact, Pete. You know there's going to be a down side." Myka, the voice of reason, except Claudia didn't want reason right now, she wanted revenge. More satisfying revenge. Different revenge. She wanted Steve back. Myka kept talking. "...don't know the consequences, Pete, are you listening to me?"

"She's not like you, Myka. She doesn't run on logic, she isn't going to look for a logical way to cope with what happened, she's like me. She's going to look for anything she can find to make it better."

Claudia leaned against the wall to the right of the doorway and closed her eyes and she didn't remember anything else about that conversation. She moved her hand out from under her cheek so she could feel the glass. Something, artifact power maybe, warmed the glass so it didn't feel ice cold and non-living. She didn't know if that was on purpose or just an accident of whatever created the artifact.

"Come on, Steve, come back to me, please, please. Come back." Claudia thought she didn't have tears anymore but there were tears, slipping down the side of her nose and over her lips, pooling on the surface. "Come on, you can't leave me all alone here, I'll fall apart. I'll go nuts. I don't have anyone I can talk to..."

She swallowed, sniffled. Scrubbed the back of her hand under her nose and got her sleeve wet, again.

"Everything's weird, you know? They're talking about the new Warehouse, and they keep talking about me when they think I can't hear, and I think they want me to be the caretaker. Dude, I saw what happened to Mrs. Frederic, okay, I can't do that. I mean, they're talking about a short list and I don't know how many people are on it but the way they're acting, they're gonna ask me to be the caretaker any day now." It scared her out of her mind. Bad taste in her mouth and her throat swollen. "I can't do that, I can't be a caretaker. You know that, dude, you know I'm a total spaz..."

More sniffling. "Sorry. I said that already, didn't I."

She had to fill in his side of the conversation. You're not a spaz, Claudia, you'll do fine. It just takes some getting used to. He'd had faith in her, at least enough to have her back, which took a whole lot of guts and a whole lot of faith. She saw it with Pete and Myka. And some things you took for granted, you just accepted, like her and her brother, but Steve was the big brother who chose her. Complete basket case that she was. As big a failure as a sister as she had been.

And she had let her brother down, although she spent all that time looking for him. And she found him, too, in the end. So maybe she hadn't let Josh down, but she hadn't given up, but that was different. That was complicated and ambiguous and there had been all kinds of reasons why she should keep looking. This was simple. An injection and a toxin and his heart stopped, simple.

"I'm sorry," Claudia planted her face against the glass coffin. "I'm sorry, Steve, I'm sorry, I tried, but I don't know how to fix this, this isn't computers, it's not electric and I don't know how to fix this, I'm sorry..." Over and over, until she'd cried herself out and was dozing on the surface of the box. Well, half sprawled over the box.

Pete found her. Scooped her up in his arms and carried her off to bed, didn't ask questions. She liked that about Pete. She curled up under the covers when he tucked her in, smoothed her hair down.

"Good night, Claude."

Steve called her that. Had called her that. Claudia turned her face into the pillow and screamed into it, then burst into tears again. Everything hurt. Nothing was safe.

  


* * *

  
"Hey, Claudia, do you have that..."

"Report on the Kellner eyepiece, retrieval and effects? Printed it out, got it right here, I know you like hard copy," she held the file folder out in front of her like it had been dipped in a litter box, pulling faces at Artie. "You know, if you'd just listen to me about going digital, this whole Warehouse restoration thingie would go a lot quicker..."

"Uh-huh. And when that happens, Hell will not only have frozen over, the devil will need to explore fascinating new terms for temperatures many degrees below Kelvin."

"You're so dramatic," Claudia made a face involving sticking out her tongue when Artie's back was turned.

"And don't stick your tongue out at me."

Spoilsport.

Claudia set fingers to keyboard and once again began typing at something more than the speed of sound. At least, she liked to think she could type that fast. In reality it was probably more like 120 or so words per minute, or less than that if she wasn't coding, but not by much. But typing that fast gave her hand cramps.

"Stupid hands," she muttered, massaging them in between paragraphs. Bunches of paragraphs. "I demand cyber limbs."

Reports and all work related stuff came before relaxing. She was under orders to relax, too, though she couldn't believe it at first and told Pete they had to be kidding. Then a humorless Regent by the entirely hilarious name of Schmidt (Schmitty!) lectured her on maintaining her mental and emotional health as well as the integrity of the Warehouse, how they had worked long and hard to determine that she was the best candidate out of several including the late Steve Jinks (at which point she'd nearly punched him), and how she owed it to everyone to prove that she really was the best candidate. In the face of unassailable logic and the alternative of causing another explosion by punching a Regent, she backed off of what few arguments she'd mustered. She couldn't argue with being forced to take down time.

Down time that she was not, it turned out, allowed to spend in the Warehouse itself.

She still snuck down to see Steve every now and again. Six months hadn't dulled that ache, just made it more livable. She could sit on his glass box, for example, and crack jokes about being the only girl over the age of ten ever to sit on his lap. She could sit with her back up against the cool surface and tell him about her day.

Tonight, Claudia decided, downtime meant breaking out the old and battered Gibson and playing through some tunes. She liked to guess which ones would be Steve's favorite.

"You're an easy person, aren't you? With music, I mean. I wasn't saying you were easy," babbling was so much harder when she had to keep up both ends of the conversation at once, which was the total opposite of what she'd expected. Maybe because she didn't have his reactions to play off of. "I mean, you're probably one of those anything as long as it's older than twenty years guys, right? Classic rock, old jazz. I never did much with jazz guitar, but I can improvise? It's probably, um. No, you know what? Let's just stick with the classics, how do you like dem Eagles?"

There was a rumor you could tell how good a guitar was made by playing Hotel California. She'd never tried it, herself, she'd always wanted to try the Stairway thing in the music stores or maybe memorize the May I Help You riff from that one movie. But she did know the song, how couldn't you, it was iconic. And she had a pretty good voice, too, if she did say so herself.

It wasn't the same, quite. He didn't look at her with bright blue eyes open and steady, the way he smiled and she had to grin back. Her fingers slipped a little. She'd have to imagine it. Easier with her eyes closed.

"So," she stopped halfway through, fingers flat on the neck. "When I was a kid, you know? I used to think that song was about that hotel from the Shining. Because it was the creepiest hotel I could think of. Now I kind of wonder if maybe it wasn't something to do with an artifact. And, I swear, I didn't used to do this before, think about how some strange supernatural force made people act funny, but it's weird, what this life does to you, you know? It makes you look at everything you knew in a whole different way, like maybe ... I don't know, maybe Robert Johnson had an artifact, and that's why he died so young, but why his music was so, oooh." And then, after a second. "Or maybe the music was the artifact. You think we could ever get ahold of the original recordings?"

Claudia uncurled her fingers from the neck of her guitar, picking a little, noodling around. "You would have had fun, if I do say so myself. I mean, if Jane hadn't stuck her big fat nose into things. I think you would really have enjoyed being a Warehouse Agent."

But they'd never find out now, would they? Her fingertips pressed into the neck harder than they needed to as she played a couple more songs; it messed up her fingering but she wasn't amped and no one was listening anyway. Black Sabbath and Metallica, good for a bad mood.

She took a breath and put the guitar away. Letting go of her emotions around the artifacts and in the Warehouse wasn't a good thing, or so the Regents kept reminding her. She leaned over, stroked a hand down the glass, which was sort of like patting his shoulder if she could reach his shoulder. "I'll be back soon, okay? Hang tight."

  


* * *

  
They talked about Moving Day in capital letters for months before it happened. Four months, at least. There were preparations, security measures, Artie had to be kept from his head spinning around and exploding and at least Claudia muttered something about wondering if it would happen for real. Myka gave her a look for that.

"What? With all the stuff artifacts do, one of them has to make your head spin around and explode."

Pete stopped what he was doing to look off at a corner of the air a foot above his head and to the left. Myka promptly ran into him. "Ow! Pete..."

"Hang on, I'm trying to remember where I put that haunted Chucky doll."

Everyone rolled their eyes. But Pete was Pete, and he kept his wisecracks and goofing off to a minimum while Moving Day happened, so that was all right. Everyone wore their safety gloves and goggles, the real ones this time and not the freaky Magneto ones, as everyone reminded Claudia. Artifacts started moving one at a time, slow and careful, though the door. Claudia met them on the other end to direct everyone to the right place for each, the plans laid out in front of her. After a while she got bored, waited till everyone was on their lunch break, and ran and grabbed the ping pong paddles from the place Pete had designated a rec room and put on some goggles and slapped reflective tape all over one of her vests. Pete laughed. Even Myka got a chuckle out of it. Artie gave her a lecture on how this was serious! business! before she threatened him with a ping pong paddle.

By the time they were done for the day everyone else was exhausted. Claudia, who had been standing around most of the day as opposed to lifting heavy objects and putting them down again, was not.

"Okay, I know I'm not supposed to be here, but I figured I'd sneak in one last time before you caught your flight." Sitting on the glass coffin, legs swinging. Not like it was a real glass coffin anyway, it wouldn't break. She hoped.

"I actually think I'm getting the hang of this stuff, you know? This whole caretaker business. It isn't nearly as bad as Mrs. Frederic made it sound, too."

She hadn't been down here in a while. Not that she hadn't wanted to, but there never seemed to be free time to do much more than scarf down a meal or take a quick shower these past several weeks.

"I mean, okay, I did kind of think for a while there that I was going to turn into a grumpy old ..." Claudia still had to look over her shoulder to make sure Mrs. Frederic wasn't there. Just in case. "Bat. Like her, but I guess that's just how she dealt with it, you know? This really isn't a ..."

Her words trailed off though the thoughts behind them kept coming a mile a minute. She wanted to choose her words carefully, even though her conversational partner wasn't able to hear them. "This is a big job," she concluded. "It's a lot of pressure. I guess I can kind of see why it would make you a humorless old bat after a while. Especially back in the day, things were tougher, for her." Which was about all she felt comfortable saying about the role of a black woman in authority several decades ago.

And thinking about that, "I mean it, you know? I meant it. I can't do this..." Claudia took a breath. "I don't want to do this without you. I mean, Pete's all right but... Pete's Pete, you know? And Myka tries, and she's getting better, she really is, but ... She's not you. No one is." Her heels kicked side to side again. Her hand splayed open on the glass. "And I miss you." Still. Every day.

Claudia sat on that for a little while before she stretched and stood up again. Moving Day and all that, she might not be doing the heavy lifting but she had to be up bright and early with the rest of them, and that meant getting a lot of sack time. "Right, I'd better go turn in," she told him. Later, she wasn't sure why she did it. Maybe because he was on the roster of things to be moved to permanent Warehouse status tomorrow. Maybe because she'd been feeling nostalgic. Maybe the coffin did it. She pushed the lid over a little, leaned in and gave him a quick smooch on the forehead. "Sleep tight. Don't let the bed bugs bite."

She'd gotten two or three steps away when she heard a giant cracking sound behind her and all she could think of was endless re-reads of Narnia. A couple heaving breaths later and she wondered if she'd remembered to replace the lid. Except there wasn't anyone around to knock it off. They didn't have cats running around either the Warehouse or the temporary holding area.

"Um..." she said. Um was good. Turning around was bad, turning around meant you got to see the Xenomorph as it chewed your face off. She didn't want to see whatever had crawled over the coffin and was coming after her.

Then it got worse. "Uh. Claudia?"

She squinched her eyes shut. "Oh Christ. Oh sweet mother of ..." That wasn't Steve's voice. It was not. Couldn't be. He was dead, they'd said he was dead, cardiac arrest brought on by some soulless bastard injecting him with some drug and he had been dead for a year, that wasn't his voice.

"Claude? Help me up?"

She turned. Swallowed through her fear and turned around even though she didn't want to, she really didn't want to, this was one of those things where it never, ever turned out good, bringing people back from the never god "Steve?"

He had the same smile. The same puppy innocent look, and he was sat up with his hands on either side of the coffin, trying to figure out how to get out of it without breaking he damn thing.

Claudia stared. While her mind churned through the possible consequences of what had happened, the glass coffin. The part of her mind now inhabited by thousands of years of warehouse programming and the new Warehouse itself fed her a clinical list of the known facts of the artifact, sort of like the Enterprise computer talking through an earpiece in her skull. The rest of her was pushing her fingers through her hair, nails scraping over her skull, toes curling in her shoes.

One shaky step, then another. Balancing between all the bad shit that had happened to them because of the artifacts and all the really cool things, icing a drink with a snow globe, making a lightsaber out of a ring. Being stuck to a pillar fifty feet up while all the metal in the warehouse piled on her.

"It's me, Claude. I promise."

Back in the clearing, grinning at each other because they knew a secret. A big one. A good one. She didn't know if they knew a secret, there was no set of mental protocols that prepared her for this. Sure, people came back from the dead in Warehouse business all the time, Artie had. But that was quick. That was easy to dismiss as someone missed something the first time. Steve had been dead for a year. She'd gotten past this. Hadn't she?

No, the chestburster of emotion in her ribcage and the way she landed up against the side of the coffin from running to throw her arms around him and reassure herself that he was solid and there, they definitely said no. Not past this.

"Are you sure?" she sobbed, all snot and tears. "You better be sure, 'cause if I find you out you're not you I'm, I'm gonna kill you all over again, you know I will." Rationality of speech, not her strong suit. She leaned back and hauled as much as she could, too, to get him out of there.

"Hey, hey, easy, take it easy." He swung one leg over and somehow they managed to get him out of the coffin. "You okay?"

"No, I'm not okay, you were dead! I had to move the whole stupid Warehouse without you!" She punched him in the shoulder. "I told you to get out! Why'd you have to get killed?"

"Ow! I didn't exactly mean oof." Another tackle hug. This time neither of them let go quickly. Or at all, until Pete came to check on why Claudia wasn't in bed and yelled for Myka until Myka came out from looking for Claudia in the office and then everyone had to have a turn and it was going to be an even later night. No one minded.

  


* * *

  
"So, wait, I'm a Disney princess?" Steve's expression wavered between indignance and hilarity. "I'm a Disney princess, and Claude's my prince Charming?"

Pete couldn't resist, everyone knew it. "Well, I don't know, I mean, I don't think blue and yellow's really your color ow." Myka had kicked him under the table.

"Thank you," everyone else chorused. Artie picked up the explanation pastiche. "Well, as near as we can tell, the, the artifact doesn't interpret 'true love' as being any specific kind of love. The, um..."

Claudia and Steve looked at each other, grinned. Equal parts delight and because it confused the hell out of everyone, even if they knew better.

"Well, I suppose, um. Faith. Over the past year, is, uh. What did it." Artie took off his glasses for the third or fourth time and did a bit of unnecessary polishing.

No one had anything to say to that for the next few minutes. Well, nothing that wasn't a horrible pile of cliches. Claudia scratched the back of her neck. Myka smiled a little. "I don't know, I think I kind of like that it doesn't differentiate between... romantic love. Or fraternal, or..."

"Best friends," Leena smiled, carefully not staring.

"Yeah."

Artie shook his head. "And there've been no... I mean, you haven't felt any, um. Bad side effects?" Everyone tensed; no one looked directly at Steve but there was a new tension there. Claudia felt the knot creeping back between her shoulders while they waited for Steve to say something.

"Does being turned into a Disney princess count as a bad side effect?" Steve muttered, then shook his head. "No, and believe me, I've been on the lookout. I don't think ... I mean, I doubt it'd be a good idea to keep trying this, but I don't think anything's going to happen."

"The waiting is the hardest part."

Everyone looked at Claudia. She didn't sing it, although she'd been tempted what with the line and the tune and everything being stuck in her head since Artie had asked that. "What do you mean?" Myka asked, leaning forward.

She didn't know what she meant. How to explain it. "It's the waiting. And you want to do something, you keep trying, but maybe after a while you just give up. And you stop trying. Or you stop keeping, um. You move on. And maybe that time is, um, the downside to the artifact. Seriously, how many people would ..." The words weren't there. Would keep going, keep trying, only she hadn't kept trying. She didn't know what she'd done. And to say certain words out loud would be to create a kind of atmosphere around them that she didn't mean to put with Steve, he was Steve.

And he had the words when she didn't. "It takes a special kind of person to get into a place where you don't let go, but you don't let it, um. You don't let it hold you, either."

"To let go without letting go? Sounds ... pretty zen." Pete made a face. Myka had pulled one foot up onto her chair and wrapped her arms around her knee, thinking.

"No, I get it, it makes sense. You don't let go of the person, but you let go of... the death, in a way? You make it not a barrier to loving that person anymore."

Nods, off and on, all around. Steve looked down at his hands, nodded like he was thinking of something else, or maybe about being in the odd position of being that person and still being around to hear about it. Pete nodded because Myka was being wise even if he didn't quite feel it yet. Leena felt it through all of them, and Artie fingered something in his pocket and said nothing.

And then there was more silence, while Claudia ducked her head harder. Having Steve back was weird, not like how she'd expected and at the same time it felt like a huge weight had been lifted. She wasn't alone. Not that she had been, but she wasn't anymore. It might be okay again.

Pete stood up, stretched, turned towards the kitchen. But, being Pete, couldn't go get a refill without a few parting shots. "So... wuv... twuuu wuv..." Or a few parting pieces of popcorn flying his way courtesy of Myka, Claudia, and Leena.

"Oh, grow up," Myka called after him, laughing.


End file.
